Thursday, January 06, 2005

Just Playing Games

Specific complaints about the Ohio vote count keep getting aired - especially on the Internet - and keep getting laid to rest, but then just keep on getting cited by some diehard Democrats.

The supposed outrage in Republican Warren County? There the authorities closed off the vote-counting site on election night. Turns out, however, the local Democratic authorities were there, inside the building, and were fine with what went down, seeing no shenanigans.

The fact that many ballots in Montgomery County showed no vote for president? Turns out there was an electrical malfunction, and the counts have been changed, with Republicans benefiting.

Votes showing up late in the process in Miami County? Turns out the original state reports were wrong.

Similar phenomena in other parts of the state have similarly turned out not to amount to much.

Yet 12 Democrats on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee have posed questions about these alleged irregularities to Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. The strategy seems to be throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

Several Miami Valley issues are at the center of this national squabble.

Some committee questions are just nonsense: How can the secretary of state explain that Sen. John Kerry did no better in Warren County than Al Gore did in 2000, even though Sen. Kerry spent more money and Ralph Nader wasn't on the ballot this time? Please. This is nothing. Republicans are leaving central urban counties for places like Warren, making the places they leave bluer and the new places redder.

Perhaps the most intriguing question is the one about the race for chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. Democratic challenger C. Ellen Connally ran worse than Sen. John Kerry statewide, by about 3 percentage points. But in some counties in Southwest Ohio - Miami, Darke, Butler, Claremont, Brown - she ran ahead of him. Why?

Is it possible, as has been charged, that some 60,000 Kerry votes somehow disappeared in those counties?

Consider: Party labels do not appear on the ballots for judicial candidates. So, in these very Republican counties, one would not expect Judge Connally to have the kind of problem that Sen. Kerry had.

But why did Judge Connally run behind Sen. Kerry statewide if she ran ahead of him in these counties? Probably because the Moyer campaign - the only well-funded one - focused its commercials and mailings someplace other than small, Republican counties.

To ask the secretary of state to explain these things is absurd. Any response he offers will be treated by the Democrats on the House committee as partisan. Nonpartisan think tanks could do this work more credibly and with more expertise.

The partisan Democrats know that. They're just playing games.

I couldn't agree more...this is nothing more than theatrics. It serves no purpose at all and will not effect the outcome.